Joan Manuel Serrat was born on 27 December 1943 in a working-class neighbourhood in Barcelona, Poble Sec, in the foothills of the mountain of Montjuïc.
His father was Catalan. His mother was Aragonese. A mixture of languages and customs that would have a decisive impact on his identity.
He took his first steps in music alongside three friends from university with whom he formed a music group. They were the ones who would encourage him to sing alone, and in 1964 he made his debut on Radio Barcelona, on the programme Radio-Scope whose presenter, Salvador Escamilla, did not hesitate to recommend him to Edigsa, an emerging Catalan record publishing label who would record his first songs.
He joined the movement of the Nova Cançó Catalana, forming part of Els Setze Jutges, a group that, through the terrain of pop music, advocated the recovery of the Catalan language and culture. His public debut came at L’Avenç Cultural Centre, in Esplugues de Llobregat, in May 1965.
He became a success from the time of his first songs, and in 1967 the phenomenon of Serrat, singing in Catalan, spread to the rest of Spain. Songs such as Cançó de matinada and Paraules d’amor made him the best seller throughout the country.
At the end of that same year. he recorded his first 45 RPM record in Spanish.
Serrat's public dimension grew and he was selected to participate at the 1968 Eurovision festival, but a few days before the competition he refused to sing if he could not do it in Catalan. His first clash with Francoism ended with him being removed from official media outlets, the ban would extend for more than five years on public television.
In the following years, Serrat alternated between producing his own songs in Catalan and Spanish, notably including Mediterráneo, and setting poems to music. His albums devoted to Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández were a real popular success and a great boost for the dissemination of the work of these poets, excluded for so long from official textbooks.
In 1975, while in Mexico and in the face of the shootings of five anti-Franco combatants, Serrat expressed his “complete repudiation of the death penalty and the official violence that had been instated”, therefore a trial was brought against him in Spain for insulting the head of State which forced him to go into exile in Mexico. For a year, on-board a bus with his group, he explored the Aztec country from end to end, performing almost one hundred concerts.
Upon his return to Spain, he was greeted by large crowds at Barcelona airport, which he responded to with a series of concerts in the neighbourhoods of Barcelona.
That same year, in November, he gave a series of concerts at Théâtre Bobino in Paris, where he coincided with Georges Brassens.
It had been a long time since Serrat discovered the Americans and America discovered Serrat, in a way that he came to view himself as a Latin American in Barcelona. The link created between both was to lead him to a new exile, now in America, as a result of his opposition to the military regimes of Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, countries he wouldn't return to until years later with the recovery of their respective democracies.
His concerts in 1990 at the National Stadium in Santiago and Plaza Dos Congresos in Buenos Aires were historic.
His identification with Latin America is reflected in the album El Sur también existe, with verses from the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti. A tribute of gratitude to people and countries that left an indelible mark on him.
In 1996, he released D’un temps d’un país, a personal compilation of Nova Cançó songs as a tribute to the movement and its members. A great effort that would only produce two unique concerts packed with emotion at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona.
He then began a long tour of El gusto es nuestro, with Ana Belén, Víctor Manuel and Miguel Ríos as his travel companions, an experience they repeated in 2016, celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of that successful experience.
Between both, Serrat has continued to present new projects with his own songs such as Sombras de la China (1998), or experimented with very personal projects such as Cansiones (2000) or Versos en la boca(2002), or he has stripped back his songs in order to dress them up and perform them with a symphony orchestra, Serrat Sinfónico (2003).
Before ending his symphony tour, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, and underwent emergency surgery which had a positive outcome.
He would return to the stage with a project in which he was closer than ever, Serrat 100x100, where, with just his guitar and the piano of Ricard Miralles, he offered us an intimate and essential version of his songs, a formula he would repeat in different tours in subsequent years, alternating it with the recording and concert tour for Mô (2006), his last project in Catalan to date.
In 2007, alongside Joaquín Sabina, he undertook an adventure that nobody was betting on, to begin with, Dos pájaros de un tiro, where they shared the stage and exchanged songs. Success led them to repeat the experience in 2012 with Dos pájaros contraatacan, for which they produced an original album, La orquesta del Titanic, with new songs written together.
Before that, in 2010, returning to the same vein of his 1972 work, Serrat set a new selection of poems by Miguel Hernández to music, under the title Hijo de la luz y de la sombra, with which he commemorated the centenary of the birth of the poet and presented a monographic show in which he proposed a journey through the life and poetry of Miguel Hernández.
In 2015, having written more than 300 songs in Catalan and Spanish, he celebrated his golden anniversary in the music profession with an anthology project in which he revisited 50 songs that were revised and recorded again, 27 with duets with friends and colleagues, ranging from Alejandro Sanz to Gino Paoli, Silvio Rodríguez to Mina, Gal Costa to Pablo Milanés, Ana Belén, Mercedes Sosa…
The same year he was awarded the Latin Grammy Honorary Award
Since his breakthrough in the music world, Serrat has continued to write songs, record albums and go on tours around the world in the most varied range of formats, from symphony orchestras to the intimacy of piano, guitar and singing, accompanied by his inseparable Ricard Miralles, alternating between his status as a singer-songwriter with the effective setting of poems by authors such as Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández and Mario Benedetti to music.
Tributes came in quick succession: His song Mediterráneo was chosen as the best Spanish song of the last fifty years through a popular vote. Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the release of the album Mediterráneo in 2018, Serrat embarked on a tour entitled Mediterráneo da capo, a musical term that means “from the beginning”, a tour that he would extend until mid-2019. Then Serrat and his old accomplice and friend Joaquín Sabina decided to put another spin on it and the pair of birds flew off again together with a third show entitled No hay dos sin tres. Unfortunately, the tour that got underway in November that year in Buenos Aires could not be completed due to an accident that Sabina suffered at the WiZink Center in Madrid on 12 February 2020.
Then the Covid pandemic emerged.
On 2 December 2021, Joan Manuel Serrat announced his return with a tour where he is bidding farewell to the stage.